One evening, I accompanied a blind Yid named Reb Chaim to his home. We were on our way back from Maariv, and his cellphone rang. “It’s a reminder,” Reb Chaim told me. “From now, for an hour, I must guard my mouth from speaking lashon hara. I took it upon myself in order to strengthen my shemiras halashon.”
The idea seemed strange to me, and although he could not see the expression on my face, he sensed how I felt. “You think it’s a strange idea,” he said, expressing my thoughts, “because the fact is that you need to guard your mouth all the time. What’s the idea of deciding that you don’t speak lashon harah for just one hour? Do we ignore this prohibition the rest of the time?!”
“And what’s the answer?” I asked.
“So I too understand that we must guard our tongues always, and I hope that this hour will bring many more hours in its wake, until I am zocheh to guard my tongue to perfection. Even though I haven’t yet been zocheh to this, I’m positive that this hour does great things for me.”
“You seem very sure of it,” I told him when I heard the certainty and confidence in his words.
“Indeed,” he confirmed, and told me the following hair-raising story:
As you know, my parents live in Rishon Letzion. They have a neighbor named Nitzan. Nitzan was a “Jew at heart” – traditional, loves the connection to the Creator of the world and to Am Yisrael. He was not shomer Torah umitzvos. About a year ago he called me up, choking with sobs. I was barely able to hear his voice, until finally he told me, “I want to keep Torah and mitzvos. I am accepting upon myself to be a chareidi Jew with yiras Shamayim, down to the last detail!” He asked me to help him find the right people to guide him on his path. He was not interested in taking it slow, not looking for leniencies; he wanted to be a true Yid as the Torah says.
To my question of what brought him to make this determined decision, Nitzan told me what happened to him on the previous Shabbos.
As I told you, all in all, he appreciates Yiddishkeit. And while he was not shomer Shabbos, one day he decided to take on shemiras Shabbos from midnight on Shabbos until 10 a.m. Anyone who heard about this kaballah told him it doesn’t work this way: He can’t say he’s a shomer Shabbos, because he is mechallel Shabbos, R”l. People teased him – “What is this about doing all the melachos from the start of Shabbos until midnight, and from ten in the morning until Motzaei Shabbos?! Hashem decides when Shabbos starts and when Shabbos ends – not you!”
No one respected his kaballah. G-d-fearing Jews claimed the truth – that according to halachah this was not called keeping Shabbos, and that even one melachah done for one second of an entire Shabbos is called chillul Shabbos. And his secular friends told him that it was no big deal to be a saint while asleep. But Nitzan felt that he was doing something in honor of Hashem. That was his level; that’s where he was holding. He was a Yiddisheh neshamah, longing.
The Shabbos night before this conversation he had with me, he was with his friends in a car, R”l. It was 11:30 at night, and he told his friends, “Soon, at ten to twelve, I’m getting our of the car, because at 12 I must start keeping Shabbos.”
They tried to convince him to stay with them. “By 12:15 you’ll be home!” they said.
“But I have to keep Shabbos, starting at 12.”
Someone suggested that he make up the missing fifteen minutes and sleep until 10:15 the following morning, but Nitzan did not agree. “I’m not going to kid myself. I took upon myself to keep Shabbos from midnight, and I’m not budging. I’m going to get out of the car at ten to twelve, so as not to do any chillul Shabbos.”
